


The Source of Burning

by Nice_Valkyrie



Series: Life in Hand [3]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Angst, Autassassinophilia/Necrophilia Fantasy, Consent Issues, F/M, Ishval Civil War, Past Sexual Abuse, Sexism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:53:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28274163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nice_Valkyrie/pseuds/Nice_Valkyrie
Summary: Violence is everywhere in Ishval, and everywhere in Riza Hawkeye: her past, her present, and her future. Most importantly, it’s in her hands.
Relationships: Riza Hawkeye/Zolf J. Kimblee
Series: Life in Hand [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2071305
Comments: 18
Kudos: 15





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The Underage warning refers specifically to limited but graphic descriptions of past child sexual abuse. Death is a strong theme in this story. Attitudes of sexism and gender essentialism are prominent across characters. 
> 
> Title from [Anatomical Angel](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/48520/anatomical-angel) by Averill Curdy, itself referencing [this](https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.126524.html) anatomical painting.

The lieutenant caught her alone in the barracks, when she stopped to rinse her face and hair between sentry shifts. Riza didn’t even know his name. He was with Sugar Company, passing through Rogue Camp on the way to Daliha. Tall, sunburned, too muscular to be called bony despite the jaggedness of his features: he was mean-looking, and he smelled overpoweringly of sweat as he wrapped his arm around her chest. 

“Scream and I’ll cut your throat,” he said thickly, pressing the tip of a knife to her collarbone. He must have expected her to put up a fight. Riza didn’t help him with her belt and trousers, but she remained still as he struggled to open them, even when the knife began to slide away from its threatening position.

When he found her union suit, he was so baffled he nearly released his grip on her. Funny: she had always found the garment an imposition, a bulky, sweat-inducing necessity forced upon her by her father, whose legacy could not be hidden by any military brassiere. She had never thought it could _protect_ her.

It was a fleeting idea. The lieutenant grabbed the crotch of the suit, tugging experimentally. When he found he could still pull it far enough aside to fuck her, he grunted his satisfaction and pushed her onto her bunk, on her stomach. “Not a sound,” he warned her again, and then he was shoving into her with a burning, breathtaking pain. Riza squeezed her eyes shut, fighting to smother both her panic and the cries that wanted to rip from her throat. 

Why was it happening again? It had been years since Berthold Hawkeye had gone to his sorry grave. In the interim there had been men Riza allowed to touch her; and men she had given a wide berth, fearing their over-friendly chatter and shrewd looks on a deeper level—a danger sensed in her spine more than in conscious thought. She was good at spotting threats. In fact, she was making a career out of it. But an instant of blindness was all the world needed to crush her, all that was needed for her to find herself face-down on a bunk, mouth frozen in a terrible silent snarl. _Wait,_ she told herself, _wait, wait for it to be over,_ curling her hands into fists and sinking her nails in until she felt sure her palms would bleed.

Why was it happening again? That was a useless question. It was happening, with this man wielding a knife ineptly and stabbing his cock into her. So be it. 

And then it was over. The lieutenant made a low, choked noise, like a cat trying to clear its throat, and a new heat flooded her. Riza felt sick. If it hadn’t been for the blade still hovering beside her pulse, she would have bucked herself free. The moments after a man ejaculated always made her feel as though she had eaten spoiled food, her body rebelling in roiling waves of nausea: _get it out, get it out!_ To her relief, the lieutenant withdrew, awkwardly zipping himself back into his uniform one-handed. 

“You’re not to get up until I leave. Count to twenty. And if you tell anyone, I’ll know, and it won’t be pleasant for you.”

Riza almost told him he had nothing to worry about. Who would she report him to? The major? 

She pushed herself up as soon as the door swung closed, hissing through her teeth. Oh, it stung. In the nearest latrine, she assessed the damage: while her cunt felt like a raw and seeping wound, there was only one small tear. This was lucky. The lieutenant hadn’t even had the decency to spit on himself to ease the way. 

She still had an old rolled-up shirt at the bottom of her pack, gone thin and stained in the armpits from heavy use and washwater shortages. She hustled back to the barracks, cut the linen up with her field knife, folded the strips securely into the crotch of her undergarment, and returned to her duty.

Crouched out of sight in the sniper’s perch, trying to hold everything between her navel and knees painlessly still, it occurred to Riza to wonder if it had only been a matter of time. 

She thought she might have been more upset before the war. Certainly she had cried often in her youth. Sometimes she still wished she could be thirteen or fifteen again, back when the only evil in the world she could conceive of was her father. But that was an impossibility: she had lived, and come to Ishval. Now she was part of the evil, too.

After her shift was over, Riza returned to the barracks. They had been a storage room before being commandeered; the bolts of cloth and baskets of grain were thoroughly ransacked upon Amestrian arrival. Now the space hummed with quiet activity as other soldiers rose creakily or fell exhausted onto their bunks. Her own bedding remained as neatly folded as she’d left it, with no sign at all of what had happened. No stain like a traditional wedding night, only the musty scent of old wood. 

Riza lay down. Dust motes hovered in the air, winking in the thin beams of moonlight filtering through cracks in the roof. As a girl, she went to bed on her back, counting water stains on the ceiling to lull herself. But sleep hadn’t come to her that way for a long time. Berthold insisted she lie on her stomach to protect the ink he needled into her back and keep the bandages from sloughing off. He even watched her, or so she thought she remembered: waking blearily in the candle flame-broken darkness to see him looming over her, hands rough and dry as he turned her over again.

The major chastised her for forgetting the faces of the dead, but some days Riza felt it was more difficult to _stop_ thinking about them. Ghostly images rose from the murkiness of her mind, unpredictable and inescapable. She felt particularly haunted just now. It seemed that only perversion was strong enough to pierce the heavy fog that shrouded most of her war.

Finally, she relented: rolled onto her stomach, breathed deeply, and thought about the girl. 

From Riza’s vantage point twelve hours ago, high and far away in Sparrow Tower, no real features had been visible; only that she was a girl, and young. She’d been skulking in the hilly brushlands just outside Riza’s range, a fact she must have been aware of, because she also kept ducking and weaving behind the crests of the land to keep herself hidden. But she’d shown herself a few moments too long, and Riza took her through the side of the head. It was a hell of a way to start a shift. 

Riza shut her eyes. Though she knew it was pure imagination, she could picture the girl well enough. By now she had a methodology, an order to the process of purging her guilt and purifying her soul. She broke down memories of her victim’s faces as straightforwardly as she disassembled and cleaned the rifle that killed them. Sunken cheeks; brown freckled skin; white hair peeking out from the edge of a dirty cloak. Red eyes. Fearful—or maybe just determined. How young? Thirteen? Old enough that it seemed impossible her own death could have been the first violence in her life. Young enough that it was a small, cold comfort to think all she could have looked forward to was more of the same.

The next thing Riza knew, she was jerking awake to a room filled with hot pale light. It was shortly after dawn. Her sleep had been brief, but dreamless.

Her body, however, did not forget so easily. The lieutenant had hurt her worse than she'd realized. Up in Nighthawk Tower, watching the ants hustle along the northwest supply line, she was still bleeding sluggishly, and her shoulders ached as though she had thrashed about instead of lying complacent. 

But while such pains could be ignored, the gentle scratch of the wad of shirt-cloth every time she shifted position could not. It was nauseating all over again. It brought to mind menstruation, yanking back to her youth as immediately and violently as the lieutenant himself had.

She still remembered Berthold’s fury the night he discovered she had passed menarche: he'd meant to continue her tattoo, but when he found the cloth folded and pinned in her bloomers, his rage was incandescent. The tools were packed up, no work would commence: it was simply impossible during those weeks. After that, Berthold had always made a point of scheduling her tattoo sessions around her cycle. He had never been able to state the reason plainly, but they both knew. 

Those memories had been blessedly far from her mind. She hadn’t had a proper bleed since arriving in Ishval. It was not unexpected, the clearly uncomfortable medic told her without meeting her gaze. In fact, women were often discouraged from serving in combat for precisely this reason. The demands of the front—meager diets, exposure, heavy workloads—disrupted their natural rhythms.

But Riza thought it might have been something different. In Ishval, she finally saw how corpses bloated in the sun. She’d thought death only made people smaller, the way Berthold had seemed in his bed. Now she knew that it could make a body big, living or not-living alike. Each time she climbed to a sniper’s post, she swelled with expectant murder.

She spilled only blood that wasn’t her own. She birthed without touching. Untethered as it was, her body abided by no laws except those of the Amestrian military. It rose when called, ate what it was given, and worked as demanded. But it was as though she had stepped just out of the stream of time. A minute might feel like an hour, or an hour might pass in the stolen blink of an eye. She could forget most of any day, allowing it to drift away like a gossamer thread of heat.

The things she did not forget were the kills. All else flickered in and out of mind. Even the rape was already fractured in her memory, and she suspected she would carry what remained long out of Ishval. 

***

Even up in the sentry towers, where the valley spread flat like a rug that needed beating, the demands of the war were never far away. As Riza descended the ladder at the end of her shift, the clanging of an emergency bell shattered the air. 

She leapt down several rungs from the bottom, gritting her teeth against the twinge of pain in her cunt, and began to run. She was one of the first half-dozen to reach the hospital tent, where two trucks had screeched up in a hazy cloud of dust. “Two more behind,” said the sergeant driver who threw open the back doors. “Mortar attack.”

“Bastards,” said Captain Grover. 

Private Harrison was ashen and out of breath. “Shit,” he kept muttering. “Shit. _Shit.”_

But Riza didn’t say anything. She kept her lips pressed tightly together and climbed into the truck. Inside, perhaps two dozen men lay in various stages of injury. One man tried to get to his feet, waving them away as they approached; Grover roared, "Private, if you could walk, you wouldn't be taking up space in the back of this truck!" The soldier sat back down heavily, face alarmingly pale, and then Riza noticed the large red chunk that had been removed from his upper arm. 

After that, it all rushed together. She and Harrison rolled the soldier onto a stretcher and carried him into the medical ward. Then they did it again, and again, as the next truck pulled up with its grisly delivery. Some injuries were more grievous than others, and the medics were soon overwhelmed. The scents of fear filled the air: sweat, urine, and above all, blood. The injured grew heavier and heavier with each trip, until Riza found herself hunched over a stretcher, gripping it so tightly her knuckles were turning white, yet unable to lift it past her hips.

She looked up and saw Lieutenant Franklin hustling with the other end of the stretcher. Somewhere in the mess they’d started running alongside each other. They’d shipped out together—he’d been handsome—tall, blond—someone Riza had entertained fantasies of sleeping with.

Now his face was pinched and scarlet, and he spat, “Carry your damned end, Hawkeye,” and hoisted his handles higher. Riza tried to match his height, but her arms felt like jelly and she only succeeded in jostling the injured man. “For fuck’s sake,” said Franklin. 

When they finally rolled the man onto a bed, Riza saw the ugly darkness of a stab wound in his abdomen. Ishvalans liked to feign death to draw their enemies close, then spring up and slash them to ribbons. They never had a hope of successful escape by that point, of course, but they could inflict a lot of damage on a careless soldier. Or one who was merely unlucky. “Medic!” she shouted.

“Look around, damn it,” snapped Franklin. “There’s too many injured. You take care of it.” He gathered the stretcher and ran off, leaving Riza alone with the wounded man.

She forced herself to breathe as she gingerly peeled his shirt back and pressed a length of gauze against the wound. She had a strong stomach for gore, but this, this necessarily delicate and close-up work, made her dizzy. The man’s pulse was sluggish beneath her fingertips. His head lolled to the side as he looked at her, a trickle of blood welling from the corner of his shriveled mouth. 

Riza wet a towel and began wiping his face. The man had a handsome cleft chin and a nose that was slender and upturned at the end. His eyes were either blue or green, but they were beginning to yield before the cloudy vacancy that only emerged in dying men. Riza saw all of this, and still had no idea if she recognized him. For all she knew, he could be her friend. 

Her hand shook, and she smeared blood across the injured man’s cheek. “Sorry,” said Riza. He didn’t respond except to twitch and sputter. She wondered if he was too insensate to remember his own name. 

Blood ran again from his mouth, but this time Riza didn’t move to clean it away. In fact, she couldn’t move at all: every scrap of strength had finally gone from her muscles, and she was stuck staring at that dribbling, brilliant crimson. 

It did not matter if this man was her friend. He was going to die alone, perhaps utterly so, without even knowing himself. Besides, she had cared for men familiar to her before—and when they died, she was always left feeling as though she’d never really known them after all. What difference did it make? 

She couldn’t bear it one second longer. When she made to put the towel down, the soldier grabbed for her hand, finding her forearm. “Wait,” he wheezed with great effort. “Stay.”

His grip was weak. Easy to slip from.

Outside, Riza stumbled down the path from the hospital until she found the solid brick side of another building upon which to press her hand. Then she leaned over and vomited a thin foul stream of bile into the dirt. 

Sometimes her thoughts returned to the question the major had posed to her, his smile like a snake’s as she held a razor to his neck. Would it be better, more morally righteous, to kill them all at once? Instead of the gentle, floral scent that had risen as she worked his soap into a lather, there was only acid in the back of her throat. _It makes no difference ,_ she told herself again, but could not keep from retching.

“You should take more care, cadet.”

Major Kimblee stood serenely a few yards away, watching her suffering as though it were a mildly interesting piece of dinner theatre. 

It had been weeks since she’d been this close to him. Back in Silver Station, he’d parlayed his authority into favors, barged in on her changing clothes, spoken softly while standing entirely too close. Rogue Camp was larger and had proper barracks, so he could no longer steal his little amusements. 

But his words still followed her, echoing in her ears. She had once heard a captain refer to Kimblee as “Major Mosquito,” citing his bloodlust and an uncanny ability to pop up when least wanted. As sickening creatures went, Riza was more reminded of a vulture. At the mouth of the little walkway, she felt him staring, gorging himself on the view of her like one of those birds waiting patiently within range of a fresh battlefield. 

The noises of the medics could still be made out; behind Kimblee, a few soldiers jogged by. So they weren’t truly alone. 

_Did it make a difference?_

She swallowed and straightened to face Kimblee. "I apologize, sir. I’m feeling ill."

The shadow of displeasure crossed his face. “You have a rather ugly bloodstain on your cuff.”

“There was a mortar attack…” 

“Yes, I’ve heard.”

How to explain further, when even recalling the scene back in the hospital bed made her gorge rise? She looked away.

Kimblee reached into his pocket and offered his handkerchief; Riza shook her head. “Don’t be silly,” he said, so she accepted it and wiped her lips. “Why so unwell, cadet?” 

“I don’t enjoy caring for the wounded, sir,” she finally said.

She’d surprised him. The smile fairly lit up his face, as shocking as if he had suddenly tumbled a somersault. “I know several officers who couldn’t imagine hearing that from a woman!” he said.

“Well, I take no pleasure in it.” 

That only seemed to amuse him further. “Some of them are still trying to turn you into a nurse, you know. They would have you wiping foreheads and dressing wounds every day.”

An older flash of recollection: Berthold gasping, wasting away in bed, the stale reek when she peeled the sweat-soaked sheets from him each morning. She held the handkerchief out. “I’m afraid I don’t have the instincts.”

“No, that would be quite a waste," Kimblee said slowly. "Your considerable talents lie elsewhere.” 

A warm flush crept up Riza's neck and cheeks. Kimblee was still smiling, and still not reaching for the handkerchief. “Where was the mortar attack?” he asked.

Riza lowered her arm slowly. “Captain Grover said it was near the financial district. Sector forty-three.”

“How close to the bazaar?”

“Three miles, maybe four? But that’s inside the perimeter, sir.”

“The chaos of a mortar attack would be an ideal opportunity for Ishvalans to steal back into cleared territory. I should obtain clearance to sweep the area."

He wasn’t wrong. With its dense network of alleyways and wreckage, the markets had seen plenty of action. Two weeks ago, or maybe the month before, Riza had been holed up there in a former fruit seller’s storefront with two other men, trying to breathe in the stench of recent battle as little as possible…

She bit her tongue against the memory at the same moment Kimblee said, “I might ask to take a sniper.”

Riza looked up at him. He was terribly at ease, his face as tranquil as the clearest desert sky. She thought of the sly expressions on other men’s faces when they looked at her. Then she thought of the bazaar, and the hospital, and of how spoiled figs smelled like rotting sugar, the same stomach-curdling sweetness as corpses. 

"Are two men enough for such a mission?" she asked.

"Yes,” said Kimblee. “If they are the two right men."

Riza held out the handkerchief. Kimblee took it from her delicately, without so much as brushing her fingers. 

“I’ll alert Freeman,” he said. “Get your pack and be ready to leave in ten. 

“And, please, make sure you get that stain cleaned up before it sets.”

Back in the barracks, securing her pack, Riza’s knees shook; but this time, she realized, it was relief. She really didn’t want to look any more of her dying comrades in the face today. 

And while Kimblee was far from a comforting presence, he had never been like the other men. For all the attention he paid her, his smiles were sincere and his voice was soft when he spoke. He had been there the morning they cleared the back rooms of a brothel, and while the other men had cackled at the sordid details they could glean—the garments left behind, the bottles of perfumed oils—his face had been indifferent. He had never cussed at Riza. He'd never forced her down on her stomach, or made her bleed.

No, the most terrible thing about Kimblee was that, no matter where she was or how she felt, hearing his praise always pleased her. He always spoke so urgently that she knew he believed his own words, and then she couldn’t help but believe him, too. 

In fact, the real uncertainty that had taken root in Riza’s mind was whether she was good at anything else.

There were only a few things she had ever been able to offer men. She’d been invisible to Berthold, too, up until puberty. At least in Ishval, soldiers respected an asset she was proud of.

And Riza wondered then if the lieutenant had also known who she was—if her reputation preceded her, acted as temptation.

Then again, she thought, hefting her rifle, perhaps simply being a woman was reason enough.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains the limited but graphic material that warranted the Underage archive warning.

The desert always chilled quickly after the sun had gone down, but that relief was still hours away, and the heat was practically visible in the air as they drove. The white cloak tugged over her head did little to prevent Riza feeling she was being slowly roasted in an oven the size of the sky. Once they had crossed over the ridgeline, approaching the edge of the market district, she had the most peculiar sense of having left all life far behind—not in space, but in time. The buildings might as well have been ancient relics. No one lived here now. 

Kimblee was unusually quiet, which was the opposite of reassuring. If there was anyone who could know what had happened to her just by looking…Riza kept her legs tensed to brace herself, but the rough road still rattled at her body. When they abandoned the car, and set out on foot, she couldn’t tell whether she was relieved or simply numb.

Kimblee’s stride was as direct as his speech, and left Riza nearly as breathless. She fell into step half a pace behind him. But they had made it hardly two hundred yards before he stopped and beckoned her to his side. “You’re here to guard me,” he said with a little smile, “not trail at my feet like a puppy.”

“I’m watching your back, sir.” But Riza stepped obediently forward anyway, and walked beside him from then on. 

They passed the textile operations, the long warehouses and stagnant basins of the dyers. 

There were the fruit stands Riza remembered all too well, and those of other food sellers. The stench was better today and the flies sparser. Farther into the district, one restaurant was capped by a mosaic inlay whose pattern could no longer be recognized; blue-and-white glazed hexagonal tiles lay shattered on the ground.

“This is certainly uneventful so far,” said Kimblee.

“I can’t say I was hoping otherwise, sir.”

“Nor was I. Are you still feeling ill?”

Riza shook her head. “I’m perfectly fit for duty, sir.”

And it was the truth. She felt clear-eyed, muscles refreshed and ready to spring. The panic of being surrounded by all those dying men had been left behind at camp. There were bodies out here, too, but they didn’t frighten her; a spent body was only a person she couldn’t be called on to kill. 

As for those who still lived, Kimblee was nothing she couldn’t handle. She’d been alone with him before. If he were to hand her his razor again, she would not hesitate to—well, she would hardly be so meek as before. Even the hot, raw ache between her legs only bolstered her resolve.

When they paused to drink water in the shade of a crumbling archway, Kimblee said, “Do you ever put that thing down?”

He was looking at her rifle, still cradled in one arm. Riza flexed her fingers involuntarily. “That would be irresponsible at the moment, sir.”

“Do you sleep with it?”

He was looking at her with polite curiosity. Something twinged between Riza’s legs—a bead of sweat, hot and salty where it rolled down her thigh in a lazy trickle. 

“I don’t have much time for sleep,” she said, capping her canteen and stepping back out into the road.

Kimblee hesitated following just long enough for the word _insubordination_ and all its implications to flicker through Riza’s mind. But his footsteps started up again, and his voice was light as he said, “I heard about your excellent watch work yesterday.”

“That was nothing special, sir.”

“Have a little pride in yourself. I doubt any of the other snipers would have spotted her so quickly." 

“Thank you, sir,” said Riza. She was gripped suddenly by the urge to tell Kimblee the truth: that she didn’t sleep with her rifle, but with its corpses. That she could put dozens of children to bed at night before trying to sleep herself. She thought he would like hearing that.

Before she could speak, however, his hand closed over hers.

Riza told herself Kimblee hadn’t meant to touch her quite so sweetly. He’d put his arm out to stop her walking, not to caress her, and his attention was fixed on a second-story window sixty yards down the road. His fingers had simply curved over hers out of instinct, or habit. 

“Do you see that?” he whispered.

Then she did: a flutter of movement, like a curtain—or a head ducking out of the way.

They moved together, pressing themselves flat against the wall. Kimblee’s hand dropped away as Riza gripped the rifle tighter and squinted around the corner. The building looked residential. The window lacked glass, and its interior was dark. If Ishvalans were hiding inside, she and Kimblee were in a pretty poor position. They would have to retreat into the bazaar, with little more than hope that no ambush awaited them. 

All this passed through Riza’s mind before the tattered patchwork cloth waved in the window again. She breathed a sigh of relief, mingled with irritation at her own carelessness. “Only a curtain, sir.” 

“We’ll make sure,” said Kimblee. “Let’s sweep around the building before heading upstairs.”

This time there was no mistaking the gesture. He took Riza’s elbow, as though they were entering a dance, and said conversationally, “Did you hear they found explosives on that girl’s corpse?”

Riza fought to hide the dread that burst in her chest. She forced her feet to continue moving at the same careful pace. “I suppose she was trying to breach the perimeter, sir,” she said, wishing with all her heart that he would remove his hand. 

“You would think they had learned better by now.”

He was agonizingly silent again as they approached the building, but at least he let her go. After checking the exterior, they made their way up slowly, combing each level before ascending to the next. It was slow work, and painstaking: Riza’s ears were alert for the slightest scratch or scuffle, her muscles tight in anticipation and heart beating loudly in her ears. By the time they reached the fourth floor, her jaw was beginning to ache from the tension. 

Kimblee prowled the perimeter of the room, brushing his fingers across the remaining furniture: a table, a bookcase. He paused at an overturned desk, tugging experimentally at the scrollwork at its splintered end. The wood gave a protesting creak. “Let’s stop here a few moments,” he finally said. He opened his pack. “Would you like one of these dates? They’re quite sweet."

"No, thank you." 

“Suit yourself.”

Riza made her way to the far wall, which faced the walking road. She pulled the hood of the cloak back, letting her eyes flutter closed for a moment as the air kissed the damp hair at the base of her neck. They were higher than most of the surrounding territory. There were only two rooftops across the way that might have offered a decent ambush position.

Through the window, the narrow road opened into a wide street crossed by knee-high walls of stone with gaps placed a few feet apart. Those were designed for wagon wheels to pass through, and made excellent cover for anyone who might have an ambush in mind. But the windows were narrow and low on the walls, so the sightlines were easy to avoid. Small mercies: she was unlikely to be surprised.

“They didn’t allow carriages in the inner market district,” Riza said, when she saw Kimblee frowning at the view.

“That’s silly.”

“Too many people walking around for it to be safe.” 

“I had no idea you were so interested in urban planning.”

“I’m not particularly.”

“What _are_ your interests?”

_Sex,_ Roza thought of saying. _Men. Alchemy. Death._ She had thought of little else these past months. Finally, she said, “History”—because what was history, anyway, but the intimacy of individual violence writ large?

“How pragmatic,” said Kimblee. “Are you planning to study when you return?”

“I haven’t thought about it,” said Riza. It was a peculiar fact that she would have to finish out her final year at the academy, one she struggled to reconcile with her present. She felt as though she’d served for years in the desert. Stranger still to try to imagine herself later on down the line, a full officer enthroned behind a desk. That future felt very remote, a tiny, distant speck hardly visible through her scope.

“I think,” she said slowly, tasting each word, “I’d like to do something to ensure a war like this never happens again. Sir.”

She had never expressed the sentiment out loud before, and the words had an unfamiliar, bittersweet tang. They felt good to speak: something in her midsection contracted and then relaxed, and in the wake of that pain, the knot of tension she’d carried all day seemed to loosen slightly. But she could see in Kimblee’s face that he was disappointed, which only tasted bitter. 

“You’re a fine soldier, Miss Hawkeye,” he sighed, “but I’m beginning to worry you’ll never be a great one.”

Riza was stung despite herself. “What do you mean?”

“What kind of soldier dedicates themselves to eradicating their own career prospects?” He shrugged, and as he did so he turned his hands up to her, fingers splayed. The dark lines of ink on each palm filled Riza with unspeakable dread. “If you really want this war to be the last of its kind,” Kimblee went on, “you should put all your effort toward making your work as thorough and efficient as possible. But I’ve told you this before. You were unreceptive.”

Nausea like a fist clenching in her abdomen rolled up in a wave. Riza couldn’t tear her eyes away from the tattoos, their cold, perfect geometry. Such precision could only be earned through pain. The needle was violence like any other, only smaller. She exhaled shakily. “Maybe I’m not a very good soldier after all.”

“Of course you are,” said Kimblee firmly. “Go ahead. Show me a few of your steps."

“What? Sir?”

“Just here.” He nodded at the window. “I don’t spend much time around snipers in the field. I’d like to have the chance to observe.”

Slowly, Riza knelt beside the wall and raised her rifle. Its weight was reassuring; it fit neatly into the crook between chest and shoulder as though shaped for her alone. Of course, she knew it was the opposite, that the rifle had worn away at her until _she_ had been shaped for _it_. The kick bruise never fully went away. 

“You lack mental discipline, it’s true,” said Kimblee, walking nearer, “but you need only think about that little stray you picked off yesterday to see you have the talent.”

Riza forced herself to hold her position. The slit of sunlight was hot on her face, and all she could think about was whether Kimblee was about to give another order. He stopped just beside her, crossed his arms, and watched her for a moment. “You see? Good posture. What would you do if we were in danger?”

The nausea was growing worse. “If I was in danger, sir,” she said, “I would be in position like this.”

“You would protect me.” He seemed to like that. “I’m afraid I can’t say the same. If I spotted a threat, I would bring the building down around us. I suppose you would try to avoid injury.”

She stood up too quickly, and Kimblee reached out to steady her. Riza held the rifle up across her chest. But this was no drill, and at this proximity, the weapon was useless. They both knew she wouldn’t shoot him. She wouldn’t want the responsibility of his life splattered across her hands. 

Her hands, now hot and buzzing as Kimblee’s palm slid over one again, settling ever so carefully.

“Another question,” he said quietly. “Does it hurt?”

Riza’s voice was little more than a croak. “Sir?”

“Kneeling like that. Holding the rifle. Your hands are stiff…” He loosened her grip on the barrel, prying each finger free tenderly and entwining them with his own. “I spend most shifts on my feet. It grows uncomfortable from time to time. And when I look at you—”

Kimblee cut himself off with a fast, sharp breath. And in that instant Riza knew everything: the terrible cost of her miscalculations, the bottomless depth of Kimblee’s hunger, and how alone and helpless she truly was. 

“—I think it must hurt sometimes as well,” Kimblee finished.

His gaze burned. There was no denial left in her, no more grasping at delusion. She was all too familiar with the darkness in men that made them want to take and take. Her aching, bleeding body still bore the lieutenant’s sins.

And those of her father. 

It was as though she was there in the house again. Lying down, spine inflamed from the repeated assaults of ink-dipped needles—the drugs Berthold had slipped into her porridge were wearing off—Riza felt something nudge her legs apart on the cool wooden table. She was still in the clutches of stupor, but this cut through the fog: the ragged edge of one nail as he probed clumsily at her entrance. Later it scratched the walls of her cunt, too, until she thought she must be gashed up inside. 

She remembered the hug and kiss she allowed Berthold to give her, after he’d cleaned his hands, glazed her back with oils, and pasted bandages over the area between her shoulders. What stood out was how she hadn’t minded his touch. He’d stolen kisses before, like all fathers did from their daughters; Riza had always hated that. Even when she was young, before she’d begun to sprout breasts or pubic hair, she remembered squirming away from Berthold’s affection, like some preternatural instinct had repelled her. And maybe it had. But after that first inking of skin, trapped awkwardly against his bony chest, she had protested not at all, for her soul had been curiously numb. 

“It does, sir,” whispered Riza. “Sometimes.” 

When Kimblee leaned in and pressed his lips to hers, she closed her eyes, wanting to feel the same nothingness. She could smell him—the sweetness of dates, faint carbolic soap—and his mouth was warm. His hands found her elbows, then her shoulders. Not her breasts or hips or anywhere else she might have guessed he would rush for. No, he only gripped her firmly and continued kissing her, and his breath began to roughen the longer it went on.

Riza let him hold her as close as he wanted. She had no intentions of fleeing, simply a profound wish to somehow abandon her body. Its heat and electrical pulses and too-numerous, too-intense sensations were an unbearable internal cacophony. And Kimblee’s mouth was too eager, but when he did finally begin to open her jacket, his hand was steady. The trousers were a bit more trouble, because Riza had to move away and stand to remove them. Kimblee watched her closely and held her other hand tight; he couldn’t know how unnecessary his caution was. 

Once she was finished, he backed her against the wall, maneuvering her carefully beside the window. “You were positioned safely here, weren’t you?” When she nodded, he pulled her into an embrace and began to kiss her again. 

_Get on with it,_ Riza thought savagely. Why devote the time to seduction, make any attempt at eroticism? Such loving preparation for such obscenity. 

Kimblee’s hand skimmed over the top button of her union suit, then went swiftly down and around to her back. He opened the rear flap casually, without a moment of hesitation over its presence. Riza couldn’t help but think he would have been just as confident even if he had never seen the undergarment before. He had the air of a man used to manipulating others’ bodies. If she had been a corpse, he would have known exactly where to find the explosives.

He reached inside the union suit and touched her. Riza hid her face against his neck and tried to focus on the texture of wool on her skin, rather than the fluttering motions between her legs. It was impossible. He petted her with agonizing care, until even the lightest touch burned. Then he found his way to her cunt and plunged in with a fingertip. It hurt as he deepened his strokes: not a sharp, bloody pain, but the ache of pressing on an old bruise. It hurt more when he pressed another finger inside her and curled them—Riza flinched and seized a handful of his jacket.

He must have mistaken her fear for passion, because an excited gasp broke from his lips and he worked his hand with greater enthusiasm. “You can cry out if you want,” he whispered. “There’s no one who will hear.”

Suddenly, horribly, it was clear her cunt was receiving his attentions as intended, for his fingers became slippery and began moving with ease. Riza couldn’t stop trembling. So this was the purpose of his slow pace: to coax her body into betrayal. He wouldn’t be able to make her reach pleasure, but he had won acquiescence. 

Kimblee mumbled something she couldn't understand over the roar of blood in her ears. He withdrew his fingers to open his trousers, and Riza turned to face the wall. It would be easier that way, she promised herself—as it had been with the lieutenant, with Berthold. A sliver of empty road was visible through the window. She focused on it as Kimblee’s hand, still sticky and feverishly hot, squeezed her and spread her apart. The stones looked as big and rough as hills, the grasses sprouting stubbornly between them like trees. She pictured herself down in the landscape, running and hiding like an Ishvalan girl, and then death would find her: fast, violent and—

Kimblee's entry stole her breath. But the worse shock was that as wet as she was, his cock slid in painlessly, and deep. This wasn’t like a drug: she gained neither pleasure nor numbness, only sickening awareness of the way her cunt stretched around him. He groaned and pressed himself against her back from navel to shoulder, hooking his chin forward so they were cheek to cheek as he thrust. He said into her ear, “You’re so beautiful. So lovely,” with a tremor in his voice. 

And Riza discovered something unspeakable just then, as Kimblee’s breath caressed her: she would have preferred pain. Without it, there was nothing to blunt her thoughts; all she could think about was him. He was happy, viciously so. How much had he wanted this? How long? It seemed to Riza just as futile to ask how long she had suspected his desire. 

She’d been told in basic that discipline was the best armor. If she saluted and marched and worked like a soldier, she would be a gleaming cog in the well-oiled military machine, dependable and therefore anonymous. But it was all too clear to her now that she could never be anonymous. Not so long as everyone knew what was between her legs.

“Won’t you tell me how it feels?” Kimblee murmured.

It felt too much, too hot, too easy. The horrifying thought entered her mind that perhaps he _could_ bring her to climax, if he had the inclination. He was no stranger to inflicting atrocities on others. And as for her own body—well, she had already discovered the terrible things she was capable of—

This, at last, she could not bear. She tried to turn, shove her shoulder between them. Kimblee grunted. “Hold on. Wait. Hold on.” His arms wrapped around her fully. Riza bucked her hips, but his grip was unbreakable, tightening like a constrictor as she squirmed. Then he gasped, “Oh, hell,” and crushed her against his chest, shaking in the throes of release.

Riza felt like she was on fire: her skin, her lungs, her cunt, her heart. As his shudders abated, Kimblee stroked her hair, then cupped her jaw and made her meet his gaze. His face was open, mouth ajar as he panted. He wasn’t ashamed. He wanted to linger in the moment. He looked her over carefully, with light in his eyes. 

Riza’s ability to predict men’s behavior, whether they were running for shelter or moving to touch her, had always served her well. She knew what was expected of her without being told. Perhaps, if she had not been born to be a soldier, she had at least been trained for it all her life. Kimblee moved exactly as she expected: he ducked his head and kissed her fully on the mouth, soft and sloppy with his lazy contentment. 

Riza didn’t need to be ordered. She kept still.


	3. Chapter 3

It was all wrong. Even after Kimblee slipped out of her and returned their embrace to a more innocent form, Riza could feel everything: the burning stretch in her hamstrings. Sweat soaking her hairline and trickling between her breasts. The stone wall, brutally hard beneath her hands and wrists. She was supposed to be numb. But Kimblee sighed and nuzzled her cheek, and she felt the heat of his skin, the flutter of his eyelashes as he closed his eyes. He seemed ready to hold her forever.

Riza twisted from his arms and spat onto the floor. Her mouth tasted like dust and his sour phlegm. “I need to relieve myself, sir,” she said as he reached for her. She darted from his hand without waiting for a reply and rushed for the stairs. The insides of her thighs were sticky with what was certainly an unholy mess. 

There was a wide strip of soil along the western edge of the building; perhaps it had once been a place to hang laundry, or even a garden. Now it was merely earth and a few scraggly patches of dry grass. Riza scuffed out a small hole with her boots. Despite the quaintness of such modesty, she glanced around to make sure she wasn’t being watched. The impulse felt like an echo of a previous life, the false breath of a corpse’s fetid sigh. 

She began to squat, realized with a wince that it was out of the question, and managed to kneel with her legs several inches apart in the dry soil. She pulled aside the flap of her undergarment and tried to convince her body to begin the unpleasant task of expulsion, or at least urination. All of the involved equipment seemed to be completely paralyzed.

“Are you angry with me?”

Kimblee had followed her. Riza nearly fell over as she turned, catching herself with one hand. “No, sir,” she said, and then wondered how the lie had sprung so readily to her lips. After all, her legs were shaking with rage—and it had to be rage, or else it was fear. “This is a private matter,” she offered, as a trickle of slime made its leisurely way down her thigh. 

“I understand. You’re not the only one concerned with hygiene.”

He cleared his throat and stood a polite distance away. Riza heard a zipper opening, the rustle of cloth, and then the splashing of liquid hitting the ground. 

She looked up in astonishment, but he was only cleaning himself in a stream of water from his canteen, humming a training song. She gritted her teeth and returned her attention to more pressing matters. If he was indifferent, she could be, too; there was nothing in cleaning up his mess that was any more shameful than having allowed him to make it in the first place. The semen came out smeared in thick gobs on her fingers, mixed with blood. 

Blood?

"Was I your first?” Kimblee said quietly.

He was staring down at himself. Riza couldn’t suppress her bitter smile. "No, sir. No.”

"There's some blood…"

He didn’t believe her. Well, she couldn’t blame him; she was holding the same evidence. It was mixed blood, both old brown and fresh red—strange, because Kimblee hadn’t harmed her. He had gone to such lengths to avoid the same damage the lieutenant had done. And, really, that injury had not even been so great. The little tear in her cunt had stopped stinging before the morning was half over. Yet she had been bleeding all day...

Understanding burst in her mind, shattering what little was left of her composure. Everything fell into an arrangement she had never seen before—an arrangement she had lived without understanding. 

“It’s my period,” she realized aloud. She had taken all her pains for symptoms of war, when in fact they were her own. 

Kimblee’s expression darkened. "That's disgusting,” he said, washing himself more vigorously. 

Whenever Berthold had been in a particularly foul mood, he’d sat Riza down for a long lecture and always demanded she meet his eye. Invariably, he raged until he’d finally cowed her into looking away. For all the pains they took to secure it, men were so often disappointed with Riza’s compliance.

“So are you, sir.”

The words lingered in her ears as though someone else had spoken them. Kimblee capped his canteen. His cock hung limp and wet from his open trousers, looking rather sad. The water dripped to the ground as he began scuffing out his own cathole. “You _are_ angry,” he said slowly. “You’re furious.”

Something was burning inside Riza. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

“I thought you enjoyed yourself. I hoped you would.”

“I have no idea how you could think that was possible.”

He was silent for several long moments. Then he said, “I have never tried to be a mystery to you.”

Riza didn’t look away in time. The motion caught her eye irresistibly, like the graceful flick of a conman’s hand: by the time she yanked her gaze away it was too late, and she had already seen the arc of piss he was releasing. 

“My apologies,” said Kimblee, and he did sound sincere. But Riza had seen the look on his face the moment before. In that flash, it was clear he both knew what vulgarity she witnessed, and took perverse pleasure in it. He enjoyed offense in its own right, she realized. Even if he would never admit it, nor commit any transgression that was not in some way sanctioned, whether by rank, duty, or nature.

As his transgression against her must have been. 

Riza had thought she’d seen patterns in the way the world inflicted its violence. There were men to be avoided, and rules to be followed. But dress everyone in uniforms and give them all guns, and the gulf between the sexes would vanish, along with all the yearning desire to fill it. She would only encounter that violence if she was stupid enough to fail to recognize its approach. 

She had been wrong. The structure imposed by the military order was little more than a threadbare blanket laid over the bloody bed of Ishval. Violence could come as randomly and suddenly as a hidden sniper’s bullet—no matter how one tried to avoid it, or how well one knew the terrain. A skilled shot would always find its mark.

When they returned to camp, Riza ate a heated tin of pork without tasting it and washed it down with half a bitter cup of lukewarm, gritty coffee. Then she surreptitiously changed out the bloody rag for a fresher scrap, though she couldn’t quite bring herself to throw away something of use. Camp was low on washwater again, so she sacrificed a half-inch from her canteen to scrub her face, her armpits, and then the used rag as best she could.

Then she cleaned her rifle. It was good to sit with the gun again. After Kimblee began touching her, she had let go of it at some point without realizing—shed it as easily as her clothing. Now she would make its reacquaintance. 

She'd had no cause to fire it today. That made no difference; a rifle needed maintenance. She still found smudges, fine grains of dust, patches where the wax had thinned. Mere existence eroded. Neatly laid out, the rifle’s components filled the space on her bunk in a pleasing manner, a clean and silent vivisection. 

At one point, she paused to wonder what Kimblee was doing. Smoking a cigarette? Writing up a report, crisp and lavish with detail about where they had gone and what they had done, with one exceptional omission? Or perhaps he had simply withdrawn, as he so often did, to ruminate. It was easy to picture him quiet and alone, a carrion bird again in his solitude: hovering, circling, returning to pick at the rotten flesh of his thoughts over and over again.

If she’d had a cock, she would have behaved differently. She wouldn’t need to scrounge and sponge and endure oozing like she was an overripe piece of fruit: she could rinse herself clean with a stroke of her hand, and walk onward. 

She was nearly finished with the rifle when Lieutenant Franklin came in. He too was freshly scrubbed: the scent of soap followed him around the barracks, not entirely overpowering the sweat he had already begun to work up again. He gave Riza a glance as he passed, but otherwise paid her no mind and collapsed on his bunk. “Hell,” he said out loud to no one in particular. He patted his pockets, found his cigarettes and wiggled one free, and then began struggling with his lighter.

Riza had the strangest impulse to help, to take the lighter gently from his hands and spark it for him. But she allowed the feeling to wash through her and only watched until Franklin muttered another curse and finally got the end of his cigarette burning. Then she said, “Hey. Where are they putting Sugar Company up?”

A frown creased Franklin’s hard, shiny brow. “Nowhere. They headed out this morning. Where’ve you been?”

So he was gone. A flurry of feelings rose in her, chief among them nausea and relief. She swallowed both. “I guess I missed the parade.”

Franklin chuckled politely. The conversation was over, then; Riza looked back in her lap and wiped a fingerprint smudge from the bolt. But a few moments later, Franklin said, too casually, “Harrison threw up for an hour after those ambulances.” 

Riza said nothing. Franklin exhaled a hearty cloud of smoke. “I guess not everyone has the stomach for such stuff.” 

“I got summoned out,” Riza said coldly.

Franklin looked vaguely chastised, and didn’t inquire further. _Good boy,_ Riza thought bitterly. 

He had probably been trying for kindness. But the military machine worked best when all its pieces were in their right places, ordered precisely, and well-oiled; and as for that, there was nothing better than blood.

The next morning, she heard the number of dead from the mortar attack. She did her best to let it pass from her mind. Numbers were for administrators. She’d had a good head for sums when she was younger, but now they all blurred together: the number of dead Amestrian men, the number of children killed at her hand, the number of days at the front.

And yet, as with her period, there were changes she could no longer ignore. Rogue Camp was emptying rapidly: as her bleeding slowed from crimson to a trickle of rust, units Alpha 2 and 3 both left, and soon Tiger followed. One alchemist and then another filtered through, bringing news of crushing victory, before hastily departing again with whole platoons of weary but determined legs. Amestris never let its aces loaf, but this was more like ambition than duty. Everyone was eager to return home.

Ever since she’d said those words to Kimblee, _I’d like to do something,_ they had hung upon her shoulders like a vow. In Ishval, most of the things you thought and said did not seem to matter—only what you did. And what Riza did, she wanted to forget. But the revelation of her period seemed to have thrown the world into sharp relief, and suddenly she could no longer ignore, everywhere, signs of the war’s imminent end. 

Kimblee was preoccupied with something: there were frequent secret meetings with austere, star-studded officers, and he barely spoke to Riza for days. Her bleeding stopped. They would be leaving soon, she knew. Heading out to the last uncleared places to purge them of unrest. This was the final ruthless push.

_And what then?_ Riza thought. What then?

***

The Flame Alchemist returned to Rogue early. Riza was on the wrong side of camp to see the trucks roll in. The brass had planned to keep her up in Nighthawk, ferreting out potential assailants from the treacherous territory, but the Ishvalans were fast learners and were already avoiding the northern perimeter. Riza was moved to Eagle Roost instead, which kept her busy. If she had seen the trucks, she might not have been so surprised when she entered the canteen at twenty-three hundred and found Major Mustang with a cigarette in his hand and a further half-dozen butts littered at his feet. 

“Welcome back, Major,” she said. 

He recognized her after a moment. “Oh, Hawkeye.” He motioned that she should sit. “Cadet Hawkeye. Good to see you. Been in camp long?”

“They’ve got me chained here,” she said. “And you, sir?”

Mustang had returned from his push into sectors eighty-four through eighty-nine with a contingent of men in good health. They were in good spirits, too: boisterous and talkative, filling the canteen with smoke and the reek of a dozen unwashed days of travel and combat. “They had a pretty easy time of it, all things considered,” said Mustang without taking his eyes off his cup. “A bit of trouble about three days in, but no real surprises. Didn’t stop them from complaining, though.”

“You’re soft on them.”

He shook his head slowly. “They won’t be happy when they learn how quickly we’re shipping out again, either.”

“It’s busy,” Riza agreed. 

An uneasy silence descended. Riza thought of the Ishvalan girl, and the bleeding soldier. She wanted Mustang to ask after her—not the camp, and not the war, but Riza Hawkeye. There was more than enough to tell. But something in her throat, tangled up in history, made any words she might have shared stick and wither. 

Mustang’s face was sallow and bloated. The cigarette burned steadily between his fingers: he was playing with it more than smoking it. Whenever he did bring it to his lips for a drag, his face pinched as though he were in pain. 

He noticed her watching. “My last ration ran out a few days ago,” he said, and laughed. “I never knew I could miss this revolting stuff. Do you want any?”

Riza thought of the pipe Berthold had insisted on smoking as he lay rotting in his bed, and the thing between her and Mustang suddenly seemed sharp and hotter than an open flame.

The afternoon she had shown him her father’s notes, she had been sure he was going to touch her. She’d felt his breath on the back of her neck, and her skin had pricked into gooseflesh at the proximity of his mouth. When he had not touched her, when he only mumbled, “That’s interesting,” and, _“Oh,”_ and, “Let me bring a brighter light in here,” she’d gone to sleep thinking that at least she wasn’t a whore.

She’d been certain of a lot of things back then. 

The back of her throat tasted bitter, charred. She shook her head. “It makes me feel lousy,” she said.

She pushed back from the table. What salvation had she expected? He didn’t even have the nerve to look at her, to look anywhere except the black depths of his cup. As she stood, she felt she could lift right out of her boots, her physical body as insubstantial and fracturable and unnecessary as a bad memory. 

She wondered if she should have told him, in those summer hours he gazed at her skin in rapture, about Berthold and what the research had cost her. Would Mustang have understood the toll? Would he now? It wasn’t sex between them, but death. Death would always be between them.

A little ways up the path back to the barracks, Kimblee was leaning against a wall, cleaning his nails by the light of a lantern. Something tightened a little in Riza’s chest. That was all the reaction she had to his presence now. She noted it with pride: no flinching, no gasping, just a sensation small and easily suffocated. Her pace remained smart and even as she passed his rangy figure.

"I need to ask you something," he said, so low that she almost didn't hear him at first. 

She stopped short; he waved off her quick salute. “What is it, sir?” she asked.

Kimblee hesitated. Riza had never seen him lost for words, and she watched warily as he laced his fingers together and fidgeted them. “It strikes me,” he finally said, “that you are young, and you might think…” He fell quiet again for several moments, contemplating his tattooed palms. “You do not like your current work, and you are shrewd enough to glean that there are many ways to serve your country.”

Riza’s gaze flicked to the dark, precise lines of ink, which seemed to stare back at her. “I don’t understand,” she said, shoving down a jolt of fear.

Even more quietly, Kimblee said, "Do women know if...something has...taken root in them?"

Then she understood, to her horror. Riza looked up sharply to see Kimblee’s eyebrows drawn together in genuine concern. _Yes,_ she wanted to snap. It had only been one time. And there was what the medic had rushed through explaining, that things inside her were too jumbled up. She wanted that to be enough, to shut the door fast on this avenue of questioning. 

The cold truth was that it seemed possible. After all, one could bleed an entire day and not recognize it for what it was. 

But all she said was, “You don’t have to worry about that, sir.”

Kimblee blinked, and relief smoothed his features. He reached for her hand and squeezed it once, a gesture as absurd as it was gentle, and let her go. “As you were, cadet.”

Hours later, Riza was still awake in her bunk, flat on her stomach as the hours before her pre-dawn watch drained away. There was an idea in her mind, a vow she wanted to make to herself. As she lay in her bunk, she thought the words: _I will never harm another child._

It was a fragile and precious idea, too dangerous to release carelessly. But it seemed to lighten the weight of all those deaths biding their time inside her. To give birth by spending only a bullet—was that what it was like to be a man? It was a shame she wouldn’t have the chance to ask the lieutenant, or her father. She was sure her voice would have carried.

And the Flame Alchemist, an Amestrian hero in his own fiery making—he was her legacy, too. Mustang and all the lives he had unmade because of her. Once he had been so happy, his round face glowing and eager for the secrets she offered. Now he couldn’t even look her in the eye. Riza recalled an aside Kimblee had made, and a cruel smile made her lips twitch: _The only use of that alchemy Mustang is suited for is burning out the latrines._

Then she remembered she had once observed Roy Mustang’s face, clear as summer sky, through her rifle scope. And she hadn't pulled the trigger.

Kimblee didn’t have the faintest conception of what Riza had really contributed to the war effort. Why, her body had been dedicated to greater use even before she had settled comfortably inside of it. Her father had tried his best to make it so that she could only ever be caressed by one other man; that every touch of Roy Mustang’s would still belong, ultimately, to Berthold Hawkeye.

Well, the joke was on him. Two rapes in as many days, and not a single look at his research. What was the point of a book written without the hope of being read? Of a weapon forged without intent to be used?

_Are you angry?_ Kimblee’s voice whispered, snaking through her thoughts, and then Berthold’s, older and rougher and worn with time: _Don’t be cross, I haven’t killed you._

_It isn’t as though I’ve killed you._


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading. It's been a real pleasure to write and share this story, and I hope reading it was worthwhile for you, too.

There were half a dozen men in the officers’ hall that evening: scrawling letters, drinking coffee, or simply chatting away, legs kicked out and spread wide. Riza was conscious of their eyes when she entered. She was a cadet in the presence of officers and a woman in the presence of men, and no one could mistake those transgressions. 

Major Kimblee sat near the front of the room. He had a mirror balanced above a small wash-basin and was shaving his whiskers with his mahogany-handled razor. In the mirror, his gaze flew to her salute. He opened his mouth, as if to speak; but he only spat the palm of a date fruit into a waiting bowl, and resumed his grooming.

Riza stood at attention beside him. She was keenly aware of his proximity, as he must have been of hers. Such dances could only be performed in breaths and stolen glances. The razor whipped across Kimblee’s chin in short, smooth strokes, and Riza couldn’t help but notice the care he needed to use, how unsteady his hand was.

 _Ask me to take up the razor_ _,_ she thought again, _and I would not hesitate to obey._

The bowl beside the mirror was full of fruit pits. Brown, wrinkled, hard little things, with a few stray bits of date-meat clinging here and there. Riza picked one up. It was slippery with Kimblee’s saliva, and smaller than a bullet. 

The face from a few hours earlier flashed in her mind: a boy this time, far too thin. She was confident he had been about twelve. She’d taken the time to watch him move, keen to make a clean kill; to avoid a handful of his skull blasted away like the side of a rotted melon, wet and red. 

She popped the pit in her mouth and sucked the remaining sweetness from it.

Kimblee sat up straighter, wiping the soap from his face as he watched her. When Riza spat the pit into the bowl, he pocketed his razor and stood.

They walked in silence, passing several campfires wreathed with the intermingled smoke of cedar wood and tobacco. It was some strange reassurance to Riza, all those people she had no interest in calling out to. All she would need to do was speak loudly, or ensure that she was seen. At the same time, she knew she would not. They were past the old, abandoned hygiene grounds before she stopped.

“Don’t tell me you’ve lost your nerve, cadet.”

“No, sir. Only hoping you would have a place in mind.”

“Hm. I think I can arrange something.” He took her hand. “Did you know you go still whenever I touch you?” he murmured.

The place he brought her—through the silence and shadows, his continued touch unobserved—was a crumbling tower Riza recognized as the first watch post set up when Rogue Camp was established. A sergeant pointed it out on her first day there. Since the camp had expanded beyond its bounds, it was now simply a place that afforded privacy: four walls and boarded-up windows. 

Riza wedged the door closed, then turned, letting her hands fall to her sides. She kept them hanging there, even as Kimblee leaned in closer and closer, pressing his palms flat on the wood to either side of her head. 

“I hear you got another little wretch today,” he said. “How old was this one?” 

The fastest mode of travel ever devised was from mouth to mouth on the front lines. “Does it matter?” she said.

Kimblee tilted her chin up. “Not to me.”

But Riza kept thinking about it as Kimblee kissed her. The light had been bad all day: hazy from an impending dust storm, and shimmering with heat. The boy might have waited an extra hour, by which time Riza would have been swapped out for another sniper, maybe one a little slower, a little less determined. If he’d had a little more time…

She had gone still without realizing it, and Kimblee noticed. He broke away from her mouth to press kisses light as air down the length of her soft jaw. “You’re not still upset with me, are you?”

And then, as she inhaled the scent of that same floral soap, familiar and sickening at once, Riza allowed herself to admit that she knew exactly why she was here. She would let him put his hands on her anywhere and as hard as he wanted. There was just one thing she wanted to know first. 

“When did you decide to do it?”

“What?”

“To touch me the first time.”

The question seemed to surprise him. “I don’t think I’d made up my mind until we were already out there,” he said thoughtfully. “Then I was looking at you while we talked...and suddenly I knew that I wanted you.”

“That easily,” she said. 

He was already leaning in again. “Not exactly,” he muttered against her lips.

But his kiss tasted the same as it had in the market district, and the touch of his hand was as hot as that of any man who had ever laid them upon her. His intentions were just as dark. Just as deadly. 

Death was death. No matter who or where it came from, and no matter when. So Kimblee had been right, when he said it made no difference whether she killed with a rifle or with alchemy. It was selfishness to think otherwise. Every one of those people was still dead.

Kimblee broke the kiss again with a growl. “Really, now,” he said. He gave her a shake. “If I wanted to lay down with a corpse, I would.”

The end of the word caught oddly on its way out, half a chuckle and half a gasp. There was something raw and unguarded in Kimblee’s face as he searched her eyes for any reaction.

Death was death...and yet.

It mattered to Riza if her shot was clean or messy, if a child died instantly, or slowly and painfully. Kimblee called that feeling pride. But Kimblee also thought she equated guilt and penance. And maybe she had, for a long time. Now that logic seemed just as flawed as he had always insisted.

She stared back at Kimblee. _Make your decision. Do it knowingly. And don’t miss._

Kimblee didn’t stop this time. In fact, though Riza’s mouth was still unresponsive, he only began kissing her more deeply. As he ran a hand through her hair, pressed his hips forward eagerly, she waited. Was that all she had been doing, all her life? Waiting for it to end? Her lips grew wet and then Kimblee forced them open, his tongue slipping inside her mouth like a vulgar knife between ribs. She went limp, sagging into his arms. 

He cradled her head as he laid her on her back. He took his time arranging her limbs: lifting each arm and letting it fall uselessly to the floor, turning her thighs outward. Riza resisted the urge to fix her hips. She ignored the way her shoulder blades began to protest the hard floor beneath her. Bodies were not simply numb, but dead. Where her hands had fallen, palms up, her fingers curled in like spiders’ legs.

Kimblee began unbuttoning her jacket. He was methodical, as though he were removing his own clothes at the end of a long day. But his silence was tense where it was usually carefree. When he swallowed, it was noisy with a knot in his throat.

It wasn’t so bad, this being just a body. Perhaps sex and war were not so different as they first appeared. Both were a choice Riza had made—was making—would make. An egotistical act, where the only thing that mattered was whether she enjoyed herself or not. The result was the same either way. Mere bodies.

Kimblee didn’t bother to take her jacket off over her arms, or pull her trousers past her knees. When he exposed her undergarment, there was a moment of breathlessness, a hunter looking over his prize. Then his hands descended again, fingertips tracing the outlines of her ribs through the cloth. 

“I remember the first time I saw this,” he said quietly. “I had no idea you were so modest…”

Something was happening to Riza. Again there was a plunging sensation in her stomach, but this time she knew it was neither fear nor anger. She knew from the way her breath was suddenly shallower, and the answering pulse of heat far below. This was a different kind of betrayal: not merely her body, but her heart turned treacherous and untrustworthy. Her very soul.

From his pocket, Kimblee produced the razor and flicked it open. It was a well-made tool, wood that was rich and dark, and a pretty blade whose honed edge caught the faint shreds of moonlight...Riza forced her eyes upward. A body wouldn’t look. A body wouldn’t be able to feel a thrill as the razor descended toward its torso.

The threads that held the buttons snapped with only a bit of sawing. “You might find it interesting to learn I had never before been with a woman who was—ah—bleeding,” said Kimblee as he progressed. He licked his lips. “It’s rather dirty, isn’t it, during that time? Unnatural. Most men probably wouldn’t be interested.” 

He paused to brush his lips across a mole beside her left breast before resuming his efforts. The union suit opened wider with each cut, and Riza’s skin prickled at the night air. The line of exposure crept straight and steadily down her stomach, as precise as a surgeon’s knife. 

Now, if she had really died, Riza could only imagine the desecration Kimblee would engage in. He was brutal, but not crude; he wouldn’t tear her stomach open or hack off limbs. Like all comforts in Ishval, it was little of the sort. If he cut her up artfully, should she be grateful to him for making her beautiful?

The dull edge of the razor worked against her skin as Kimblee sawed through the gusset between her legs. Underneath, she was sticky with heat. That was the end of the union suit, Riza supposed. She doubted if there were spares in camp. But since she was dead, she was no longer beholden to Berthold. There would never be a reason to worry about his research again.

When Kimblee spread her folds with one hand and plunged the fingers of the other inside her, he likely intended it to hurt: a test for Riza, to see how far her willingness really extended. But his fingers sank in easily to the knuckles, and her humiliation was complete. Kimblee made a throaty noise and ripped his fingers free. He raised his hand, examining the wet sheen in the available light. 

His dismay was palpable. He sucked on his fingers, as though to confirm his suspicions, and the feeling emanating from him grew even frostier. But what could he do?—ask her to repeat this little performance the next time she bled? He couldn’t force her, and he would never beg.

But Kimblee made his peace with disappointment quicker than she’d anticipated. He swooped down and covered her cunt with his mouth. Riza fought back a gasp. No man had ever touched her this way before. In some small, distant part of her mind, she thought she ought to be grateful Kimblee was the first one to do so. She was dead, she reminded herself desperately: she should not feel the heat of his mouth, or his eager, greedy lapping tongue, or the saliva dripping down her slit. 

It was impossible. 

Death was death, but Riza was alive. That was the only truth she could be certain of now. She was more than just a soldier—a woman—a body. Wasn’t Kimblee proving that himself, as his every touch made her want to shake and weep at once? She wished she could close her eyes. The next moment could beget anything: his teeth, the razor blade, a horrible crest of orgasmic bliss. That was the wonder, and the terror, of living. 

Kimblee pulled up and crawled over her, one hand rushing for his trousers. “I felt guilty for wanting you,” he whispered in a rush as he searched and tugged. “There are a lot of things I want, and have always felt strangely guilty for wanting…

“But the feeling leaves when I finally allow myself to take them. It’s the only resolution I’ve ever found.”

How odd, Riza thought. Usually one felt guilt for deeds they _had_ done.

Kimblee sank inside her again, this time slowly and with a whimper. His cock, his scent, everything was just the same; but his hunger, though no less wild, was somehow leashed. Last time, he had been so eager his lust overcame him in a bare few minutes. Tonight he wanted to savor her. He hitched one of her legs up around his hip and pressed in, until he could go no further, and Riza flinched involuntarily. There he stayed, breathing hard, thrusting erratically with short and lazy strokes. His weight pressed down upon her, and Riza thought of all his victims, entombed under rubble.

Did it matter that Kimblee was gentle where the lieutenant had been rough? Did it matter that Riza asked Berthold for more drugs the second time he brought out the needle? Such little kindnesses. They’d made a difference at the time. But in the face of the world’s violence, it was hard to see that they had any significance at all.

Her raised foot flopped uselessly with Kimblee’s thrusts, heel smacking his back, but he didn’t seem to mind. He kept looking down at himself. Whether he was distressed or excited by what he saw, Riza couldn’t tell. She thought of the tattoo needle, punching in hard and pulling out red. But that blood and pain were over; all that was left was an itch on her skin and the sensation of having been changed.

One act did not cancel out another. Kimblee’s hands could never erase the lieutenant’s. And if Riza went to him again, or to Mustang, or Franklin, any man in the world, none of them could undo her father’s touch. 

Berthold Hawkeye had made certain his daughter was a beautiful weapon. He inked each encrypted line in his narrow, precise calligraphy. He measured the diameter of his circles, making sure to account for the curvature of back muscles and the ridges of her young spine. When Riza was finally able to bear looking at it in the mirror, she’d flexed and twisted and admired the craftsmanship. Her gratitude, like her pride, was another secret shame.

But even if the notes were beautiful, they were still etched permanently on her skin. And even if Kimblee was artful or kind about it, if he flipped her lifeless body over and found them, there would be nothing Riza could do to stop him.

“Do you still wish you could kill me?” Kimblee panted in her ear.

Riza wanted to throw her arms around him. But she wasn’t sure if it would be to fight him off, or seize him closer. Her life was all she had, vibrant and rich in its boundless splendor—just as much as others’ lives were, just as that girl’s and that boy’s had been. It could be taken from her tomorrow, leave her bleeding out in a field hospital as her comrade fled from her bedside. And what had Riza done with life so far? Her legacy was the same as her father’s: pain and fear and alchemy. 

“I rather suspect your preferred method of flirting with me would involve a bullet through my forehead from a considerable distance,” said Kimblee. His hips pumped harder and faster. “I estimate—nine hundred yards. At short range, you might aim your rifle between my eyes. And when very, very close”—he gasped—“a revolver jammed into the soft tissue beneath my chin—”

Kimblee clutched her as he shook, gripping her arms so tightly Riza nearly cried out. An animal noise tore from his throat as his teeth sank into her shoulder, and he shuddered again and again. When he released his bite, it was to inhale heavily. Then he leaned down and planted a slow kiss on the perfect aching imprint of his teeth.

Riza lay very still. The game was over, and she could move now if she wanted, but she waited. 

After a long time, Kimblee shivered once more and finally drew himself up and out of Riza. He nudged her thighs farther apart and knelt between them. His fingers slid inside her again, so hesitant they were almost apologetic. The motion was the same one he’d used in the market district, but this time it was clear what he was trying to coax from her. And Riza thought about all the hypocrisies people carried inside of them, and how stupid and simple it was to believe that only one truth could exist in each moment of life.

She now understood what made Ishvalans spring to their feet and rage against Amestrian soldiers, even when victory was impossible and death inevitable. It was pure defiance: a refusal to give up, a promise that change would be wrought before they succumbed. A bone-deep need to have some effect upon the world, even when one knew themselves to already be lost.

Kimblee said, “Sometimes I wonder if you want me to kill _you .”_

Riza pushed herself up to look at him. Kimblee was hunched over himself, head bowed in concentration. The wet exercise of his fingers was gentle but unceasing. His semen spilled out and ran down to the ground. Shameless. 

"It would have to be alchemy, of course, and I don't think you would like it very much."

Riza had once made the mistake of grabbing the steel butt of her rifle after it had basked for hours in a patch of direct sunlight. Her palm burned so badly it blistered—but she didn’t let go. She wrapped the hand in gauze and continued her duties, only occasionally wincing, and she had gone on like that every day until the skin grew over healthy and new. 

There was only so much she could lay at her father’s feet. Her hands were full of death, too. When she was younger, she tormented herself with the idea of what was possible if she trusted the wrong man with Berthold’s research. But all she had to do was look out the window of this broken Ishvalan home to see what had happened when flame alchemy was in the hands of the right man.

No man’s hands could absolve her. Only her own. 

And right there, in the privacy of her own mind, she renewed her vow. She would never bring harm to another child after Ishval. Once the war was over, she would not allow the blood of innocents to stain her hands. 

_Once the war was over._ Even as she decided, Riza knew she was making a concession for which she would not be able to forgive herself. It was hardly brave, avoiding murder when you held a pen and not a rifle. 

That was all right. Some things could not be forgiven.

One day, a bad day, Berthold had threatened to carve his research into Riza’s skin in as ugly a script he could conceive of: uneven, asymmetric, harsh and jagged as though crudely scratched out with a shard of glass. No one, he promised, would ever be interested in reading it. Certainly they could never enjoy the sight.

She’d looked him in the eye and said nothing. Slowly, Berthold’s expression faltered; three days later, there was a strange taste in her porridge. 

She’d shown him the limit of his power over her. He must have realized it was his last chance.

"Would it hurt _you?_ _”_ Riza said. “Using alchemy, to…?” 

Kimblee was silent for a moment. He inserted his fingers again, though she already felt clean. He spoke dispassionately: **“** In many ways, an alchemist is little more than a way to organize the flow of power…the action itself is harmless, even pleasant. I welcome being used as alchemy’s conduit. Its embrace is as tender as that of an old friend or lover.”

He withdrew his fingers and wiped them on the scraps of her undergarment. But when his gaze flicked up to meet hers, his eyes were wide and melancholy. They were not blue, as she had believed, but instead unmistakably a pale, hazy gray, like the plumes of smoke which billowed from steady fires.

“It might hurt,” he said slowly. “I think I could imagine that.” 

So could she, Riza thought. So could she.

* * *


End file.
